Hercules does not, as yet, receive any substantial financial support from anyone, be it TurboHercules SA, Microsoft, or even happy users.
FWIW, I'm happy Microsoft is helping in some way, even if I'm not seeing it personally (and could really, really use the help...)
Neither the GPL v3 nor the IBM CPL were available when the choice of an open source license was made back in the early years of the project. The QPL was chosen because, at the time, it met the goals of the project's management most closely.
I don't have to read about T3 or PSI. I'm well familiar with them. Just because Microsoft sees self-interest in helping someone sue IBM doesn't mean that the cause is any less just.
PJ is letting her anti-Microsoft blinders get in the way of her thinking. TurboHercules would be pushing this issue even if Microsoft weren't involved - and they're not, aside from sharing memberships in a couple of trade organizations. The Hercules project has been open source for over a decade now.
IBM's comments in the Register are quite one-sided, as you might expect. It speaks poorly of PJ that she swallowed them hook, line, and sinker without doing her own thinking.
TurboHercules did not assert any patents or intellectual property rights against open source software, or IBM, or anyone else. Thus, IBM's exception doesn't apply.
The CCIA is hardly a Microsoft arm. They fought against Microsoft in their EU antitrust case, and were responsible for the part of the decision that required Microsoft to make their interoperability documentation available to the Samba project.
To quote Larry Niven: "Ideas are not responsible for those who believe in them." Not even Microsoft is perfectly evil.
Sorry, but I have to object to your use of the term "legitimate". There's nothing illegitimate about Hercules. It's an independent, open source development, and calling it illegitimate is an attack on the open source community just as much as IBM's letter is.
The z/PDT emulator was introduced a couple of years after IBM drove two commercial emulators out of the marketplace, and only because they found that people were getting away from developing for the mainframe rather than use IBM's remote offerings. Even though it's available internally (for some funny money), and even despite persistent reports that doing so is officially a firing offense, I still get regular reports from IBMers using Hercules internally to IBM in preference to it.
There's a crucial difference between Hercules and PSI: IBM can't kill the project by buying it out. The QPL, like all Open Source Definition-compliant licenses, prevents that; the emulator would continue to exist and be freely available. If IBM were to offer me enough money, I could be convinced to quit supporting or distributing it, but that would only be a very short, temporary impediment to its distribution.
Since IBM can't buy Hercules out, they have to kill it some other way if they want to retain their total monopoly in the mainframe computing market. The patent attack is their weapon of choice, and it reveals them as no better than other software patent troll.
I don't know if it's the primary reason it's there in the first place - after all, the original work was done at IBM's labs in Boeblingen, Germany - but many Linux developers use Hercules as their platform of choice. I've gotten comments from several who told me that they prefer firing up Hercules to logging onto a real z/Series system for kernel work.
A patent attack on TurboHercules SA is an attack on the open source project, since the company is using the Hercules package unaltered in its solution.
There is no "commercial version". TurboHercules SA sells support and services around the Hercules open source project. The threat IBM made to TurboHercules was aimed squarely at the Hercules project.
If Microsoft is bankrolling this, why am I flat broke?
IBM's actions show that they're only interested in Open Source when it makes money for them. Once they have to compete with it, then the gloves come off. Yes, they've been a big benefactor, but they can and will turn on the community if they think it's in their best interest.
There is no fork, closed or open source. TurboHercules SA sells support and services for Hercules the open source emulator. There is only one codebase, and only one set of developers. IBM's attack on TurboHercules SA cannot help but attack Hercules the open source project.
TurboHercules SA is a company formed to commercialize the Hercules open-source emulator. The accusations IBM made in its letter apply as much to Hercules as they do to TurboHercules, since the latter simply sells services and support for the emulator.
Yes, Hercules is open source. The QPL is an approved open source license, according to the Open Source Initiative.
You can't take the entire castle and copy it, because the scripts are never sent to the client. For buildings, this isn't that big a deal, but it is for other objects.
I do wish there was a compatible scripting engine in OSGrid. If there was, I'd use it for script development and tuning instead of paying L$2000 a week (about US$8) for a parcel and estate manager privileges. (I actually pay L$6000 a week, but have a couple of renters that defray most of the cost.)
The last I'd heard, C# scripting was much farther off than "a couple of months". I wish it wasn't, for lots of reasons (I mean, come on, when the scripting language provides no persistent storage features whatsoever and the only generalized aggregate data structure is a list that cannot contain lists, the language needs to join the 1960s), and when C# scripting is available, I've got an open-source scripting suite that will get entirely rewritten in it, but for now, we're stuck with LSL and all of its warts.
The Foundation trilogy is about the least SFnal SF from the standpoint of imagery. There's precious little spaceships, or future tech. It's all in the minds of the characters, and in the dialogue. This movie could have been made in 1975 and not suffered visually at all.
If it doesn't work on all hardware, or requires annoying configuration, it doesn't "just work". I know when I unbox an Apple system that I can put it on my desk, power it up, and be productive in minutes. That's never been true for Linux systems for me.
The same goes for free software for Linux. It's written by programmers, with not that much user input, and it shows in the learning curve involved.
Hardwar at a quarter of the price of a Mac doesn't interest me. My time is more valuable than that, and the time lost in dealing with the infinite configuration options is time I'm not spending being productive. Once again, it's a tool, not a toy.
I'm a long-time Linux user and even occasional contributor, and most of the development work I do for Hercules is on Linux. My primary desktop and laptop run OS X, though, for one simple reason: they're tools, not toys. I need them to just work when I sit down in front of them to get things done. I find I spend far too much time getting a Linux desktop to that point.
I tell people I'm a Mac user because I'm a Unix geek. OS X, unlike Linux, is a system you can give to your computer-illiterate inlaws and have it be solid and reliable, and not have to spend hours on the phone playing tech support. Being Unix-based, it's far more secure and stable than Windows, too.
So what if it's closed source? It just works, and that matters to me far more.
There's another implication of that theory, and it's one that conservatives have been arguing for some time now: the end result of the current drive to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions is the destruction of the worlkd economy.
I'm just the other way around. I find Photoshop complex, but possible to find ways to do anything you want. The GIMP seems to hide things in really weird places, to me.
Amen. Every time I've tried using the GIMP, I gave up in total frustration. I worked at it for a while when I needed a graphics editing program on my OS X laptop, and finally deleted it in disgust and bought Pixelmator.
For all of the howling the Obamessiah's followers made during the campaign about how evil Bush's policies were, he's sure continuing a lot of them that he originally pledged to do away with. Of course, nobody would DARE admit that maybe, just maybe, Bush was right...
The NYTimes story on the inquiry mentions that they're also looking at IBM's refusal to license their software to run on the Hercules open source IBM mainframe emulator. It ill be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no difference between the two. TurboHercules is selling software and support for the open source Hercules package.
Hercules does not, as yet, receive any substantial financial support from anyone, be it TurboHercules SA, Microsoft, or even happy users.
FWIW, I'm happy Microsoft is helping in some way, even if I'm not seeing it personally (and could really, really use the help...)
Neither the GPL v3 nor the IBM CPL were available when the choice of an open source license was made back in the early years of the project. The QPL was chosen because, at the time, it met the goals of the project's management most closely.
I don't have to read about T3 or PSI. I'm well familiar with them. Just because Microsoft sees self-interest in helping someone sue IBM doesn't mean that the cause is any less just.
PJ is letting her anti-Microsoft blinders get in the way of her thinking. TurboHercules would be pushing this issue even if Microsoft weren't involved - and they're not, aside from sharing memberships in a couple of trade organizations. The Hercules project has been open source for over a decade now.
IBM's comments in the Register are quite one-sided, as you might expect. It speaks poorly of PJ that she swallowed them hook, line, and sinker without doing her own thinking.
As I said earlier: if Microsoft were funding this, I wouldn't be flat broke. Not even Microsoft is evil 100% of the time.
TurboHercules did not assert any patents or intellectual property rights against open source software, or IBM, or anyone else. Thus, IBM's exception doesn't apply.
The CCIA is hardly a Microsoft arm. They fought against Microsoft in their EU antitrust case, and were responsible for the part of the decision that required Microsoft to make their interoperability documentation available to the Samba project.
To quote Larry Niven: "Ideas are not responsible for those who believe in them." Not even Microsoft is perfectly evil.
Sorry, but I have to object to your use of the term "legitimate". There's nothing illegitimate about Hercules. It's an independent, open source development, and calling it illegitimate is an attack on the open source community just as much as IBM's letter is.
The z/PDT emulator was introduced a couple of years after IBM drove two commercial emulators out of the marketplace, and only because they found that people were getting away from developing for the mainframe rather than use IBM's remote offerings. Even though it's available internally (for some funny money), and even despite persistent reports that doing so is officially a firing offense, I still get regular reports from IBMers using Hercules internally to IBM in preference to it.
There's a crucial difference between Hercules and PSI: IBM can't kill the project by buying it out. The QPL, like all Open Source Definition-compliant licenses, prevents that; the emulator would continue to exist and be freely available. If IBM were to offer me enough money, I could be convinced to quit supporting or distributing it, but that would only be a very short, temporary impediment to its distribution.
Since IBM can't buy Hercules out, they have to kill it some other way if they want to retain their total monopoly in the mainframe computing market. The patent attack is their weapon of choice, and it reveals them as no better than other software patent troll.
I don't know if it's the primary reason it's there in the first place - after all, the original work was done at IBM's labs in Boeblingen, Germany - but many Linux developers use Hercules as their platform of choice. I've gotten comments from several who told me that they prefer firing up Hercules to logging onto a real z/Series system for kernel work.
A patent attack on TurboHercules SA is an attack on the open source project, since the company is using the Hercules package unaltered in its solution.
There is no "commercial version". TurboHercules SA sells support and services around the Hercules open source project. The threat IBM made to TurboHercules was aimed squarely at the Hercules project.
If Microsoft is bankrolling this, why am I flat broke?
IBM's actions show that they're only interested in Open Source when it makes money for them. Once they have to compete with it, then the gloves come off. Yes, they've been a big benefactor, but they can and will turn on the community if they think it's in their best interest.
There is no fork, closed or open source. TurboHercules SA sells support and services for Hercules the open source emulator. There is only one codebase, and only one set of developers. IBM's attack on TurboHercules SA cannot help but attack Hercules the open source project.
TurboHercules SA is a company formed to commercialize the Hercules open-source emulator. The accusations IBM made in its letter apply as much to Hercules as they do to TurboHercules, since the latter simply sells services and support for the emulator.
Yes, Hercules is open source. The QPL is an approved open source license, according to the Open Source Initiative.
You can't take the entire castle and copy it, because the scripts are never sent to the client. For buildings, this isn't that big a deal, but it is for other objects.
I do wish there was a compatible scripting engine in OSGrid. If there was, I'd use it for script development and tuning instead of paying L$2000 a week (about US$8) for a parcel and estate manager privileges. (I actually pay L$6000 a week, but have a couple of renters that defray most of the cost.)
The last I'd heard, C# scripting was much farther off than "a couple of months". I wish it wasn't, for lots of reasons (I mean, come on, when the scripting language provides no persistent storage features whatsoever and the only generalized aggregate data structure is a list that cannot contain lists, the language needs to join the 1960s), and when C# scripting is available, I've got an open-source scripting suite that will get entirely rewritten in it, but for now, we're stuck with LSL and all of its warts.
The Foundation trilogy is about the least SFnal SF from the standpoint of imagery. There's precious little spaceships, or future tech. It's all in the minds of the characters, and in the dialogue. This movie could have been made in 1975 and not suffered visually at all.
If it doesn't work on all hardware, or requires annoying configuration, it doesn't "just work". I know when I unbox an Apple system that I can put it on my desk, power it up, and be productive in minutes. That's never been true for Linux systems for me.
The same goes for free software for Linux. It's written by programmers, with not that much user input, and it shows in the learning curve involved.
Hardwar at a quarter of the price of a Mac doesn't interest me. My time is more valuable than that, and the time lost in dealing with the infinite configuration options is time I'm not spending being productive. Once again, it's a tool, not a toy.
I'm a long-time Linux user and even occasional contributor, and most of the development work I do for Hercules is on Linux. My primary desktop and laptop run OS X, though, for one simple reason: they're tools, not toys. I need them to just work when I sit down in front of them to get things done. I find I spend far too much time getting a Linux desktop to that point.
I tell people I'm a Mac user because I'm a Unix geek. OS X, unlike Linux, is a system you can give to your computer-illiterate inlaws and have it be solid and reliable, and not have to spend hours on the phone playing tech support. Being Unix-based, it's far more secure and stable than Windows, too.
So what if it's closed source? It just works, and that matters to me far more.
Me, I just find it ironic they felt compelled to ask the question on Slashdot, home of the biggest information junkies around...
There's another implication of that theory, and it's one that conservatives have been arguing for some time now: the end result of the current drive to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions is the destruction of the worlkd economy.
I'm just the other way around. I find Photoshop complex, but possible to find ways to do anything you want. The GIMP seems to hide things in really weird places, to me.
Amen. Every time I've tried using the GIMP, I gave up in total frustration. I worked at it for a while when I needed a graphics editing program on my OS X laptop, and finally deleted it in disgust and bought Pixelmator.
For all of the howling the Obamessiah's followers made during the campaign about how evil Bush's policies were, he's sure continuing a lot of them that he originally pledged to do away with. Of course, nobody would DARE admit that maybe, just maybe, Bush was right...
I've argued for an IBM mainframe software personal use license for a decade, inspired by the OpenVMS hobbyist license. It's fallen on deaf ears.
The NYTimes story on the inquiry mentions that they're also looking at IBM's refusal to license their software to run on the Hercules open source IBM mainframe emulator. It ill be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.